


The Time Is Right

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Dean’s Self Worth Issues, First Time, M/M, mpreg Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 08:56:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19903123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: When Dean goes to get Sam from Stanford, he’s already well into his pregnancy. By the time they leave, Sam has become all about protecting his big brother and his bump.Dean thinks it’s Sam’s way of dealing with the loss of Jess.It isn’t.





	The Time Is Right

There are, apparently, five stages to grief.

Dean thinks its cute that somebody decided every damn person got through loss the same damn way.

Maybe for some people, there are, and they work through them like a course, section by section, neat little notes in the margin.

Maybe some people rage straight through all five in a moment, an hour, or a day, and then go numb for years, shutting it down.

And maybe some people don’t go through any at all, choosing instead to focus that pain and anger into something else with an intensity that could boil every sea on the planet.

Dean thinks that’s where Sam is right now, and that focus is now on him.

He rolls his eyes as he hears Sam ‘discussing’ the quality of their motel room with the manager, and if that’s his inside voice, Dean would hate to hear his little brother yelling.

When Sam returns (Dean’s sure Sam just ‘discussed’ them out of a room), he can’t help but cock an eyebrow at him.

“Banshees the world over want tips, dude,” he says.

Sam looks sheepish, but his horns are still out, and Dean’s kind of missed that fire.

“No way are you sleeping on those sheets. They look like the last time they got washed was when this place was built.”

“Slept on worse.” With their cash flow, way worse. And sometimes the back of their car, and sometimes, just anywhere.

“Not like that,” Sam says, and he waves his hand at Dean.

They don’t get new sheets (Dean figures they’re lucky they don’t get kicked out, and they’ve already paid even if it is the fictitious Arnold Somnabaker who’ll be getting the bill) but there are a couple of old blankets in the trunk, and Dean insists he can manage to get them, and then has to insist that he doesn’t need two, and that Sam is taking the other.

They settle down in silence, Dean full aware his brother isn’t sleeping at all, no surprise, and wondering if his head is still full of watching his girlfriend burn on the ceiling.

He wished he knew a way to scrape that memory right out of Sam, but the kid’s tough. He’ll get through, and if pouring everything into looking after his big brother helps….

Doesn’t make it any easier, when Sam gets up three times in the night to make sure the salt lines are intact, that nobody’s sneaking up on their room, and that Dean hasn’t suddenly become a medical emergency.

“Sam,” Dean says, as his brother starts fussing with the blanket, “people have been having babies since the beginning, you know?”

Personally, he thinks birth control should have been available that first day and what a unholy mess that would have prevented.

“None of whom were my brother,” Sam says, and Dean sags back, aware that the next couple of months are going to be interesting.

++

He doesn’t give up the driving seat; he’d have to be unconscious or dead, and Sam will just have to pout about that. But Dean gives ground on other things; they will still hunt, but he lets Sam give the okay on what’s safe or not (he doesn’t need to know that Dean’s deliberately picked up on ones that won’t turn his brother grey prematurely, and nudged the rest to other hunters in the area).

Even then, Sam takes the lead, and it chafes, Dean can’t lie, but it’s worth it, the bigger picture.

Especially when what they thought was one witch turns out to be five, and one of them launches a hex bag at Dean that explodes into a fine purple mist and suddenly he can’t stand.

He can’t breathe, either, and it’s not until her body hits the ground that whatever’s working on him just dissipates and lets him inhale.

Sam is over him like a downpour, cupping his face, hands probing, searching, thorough and fast, and then he’s on his knees next to Dean, holding him upright, just staring at him.

“No,” he says. “Can’t...I can’t lose you too.”

He pulls Dean into his arms, and Dean doesn’t resist, couldn’t, his body sagging against the solid, yet trembling, support.

Sam gets them up, eventually, puts Dean in the car while he cleans the scene, and then drives them the hell out of there.

He finds them an empty house, four towns over, one with no alarm, and gets Dean inside.

It’s the floor, this time, with their blankets and coats for bedding and duffels for pillows, but Sam can mark up this place as he likes and he litters it with every protective symbol he knows.

And then he goes back to Dean, and strips him, and checks him again, hands lingering over Dean’s bump, grinning when he finally feels a kick.

When he kisses him, Dean doesn’t resist. He doesn’t reciprocate either, but then he’s pregnant, sore and exhausted, and Sam gets that.

He settles down, and pulls Dean to rest against him, and Dean sleeps until daylight streaming in on them wakes him with its warmth.

There’s a diner nearby, where they eat, before getting back on the road, and Sam seems different then. More charged, but in a good way, as if he left something behind in that town

Dean hopes it’s a permanent step in the right direction for his brother, but either way, he’ll be there.

++

It takes a little reassurance to get Sam to fuck him. His geek has already been through a few hundred articles on the internet, even taken notes, and while there’s maybe a couple of months until Dean is due, if Sam is slow and gentle, then it’ll be okay.

Even so, he’s so slow and gentle that Dean has to remind him they have a check out time in the morning and that he’s pregnant not suddenly made of glass.

It doesn’t stop Sam from being so careful that Dean might as well be, but there’s a part of him that is both stunned by it and doesn’t quite know what to do with someone taking such care with him.

After, Sam’s head pillowed on his chest, his mind does what it usually does, and starts painting things black, and he wonders if this is the ultimate rebound.

If he’s literally a comfort hole for his brother, there, safe, available, and unable to really go anywhere, because a) near his due date and b) he’ll always be near where Sam is.

They’re twisted together, like barbed wire, and how the hell is this even where they should be?

Dean doesn’t get any sleep that night, and he’s very careful the next few days to touch Sam, or by touched by him, as little as possible.

And yes, Sam notices, and probably thinks it’s something he’s done, but communication in this family has never been a strong suit, so neither of them even says a word.

++

Until the pain starts, feeling like somebody punched him in the spine, and then his pants are soaked through, and he screams more than speaks his brother’s name.

He’s able to pull in, and thank fuck they were on the way to Bobby’s (Sam’s idea, bright kid, because if Dean won’t let his brother touch him, somebody has to help him push a kid into the world) because this last stretch to the auto yard is isolated, and rural, and there’s a hundred places to stash a car where it won’t be seen from the road.

Dean just has to find one, and he does, and then sags back as his contractions start.

Sam pushes the front seat back, and runs around to the other side of the car as Dean slumps down, panting through the pain.

This is kind of what he’d feared; getting caught out, someplace probably not suited to giving birth, and yeah his car on a dirt road probably fits that to a tee.

But he’s not alone, at least, and then Sam’s cutting off his pants, and Dean manages to push himself up on his elbows enough to glare.

“I’m not…. Labor can take hours.”

Sam gives him a sharp look. “Yeah? Tell your baby that; you’re crowning.”

Another explosive bout of pain steals Dean’s capacity for denial, and then Sam’s telling him to push, and he does, and he keeps pushing, even when it feels like he’s been ripped open.

And then he hears a high pitched, unhappy little squeal, and Sam’s holding a small prune like bundle of warbling little human - a boy, as it turns out - before he carefully deposits the kid in Dean’s arms.

Getting him upright and over to the passenger side takes effort, but that’s how Dean makes the last few miles to Bobby’s a blanket draped over him and his son napping in his arms.

++

He goes to see Sam that night, once John Robert’s asleep, and finds his little brother sitting up in the den, with a beer going warm in his hands.

Dean eases himself down to the rug, and steals the bottle, prompting a sour look.

“I _was_ pregnant,” he says, because he can tell that’s where Sam’s protests will head. “And now I’m not. Gimme.”

He downs half of it, then hands it back, and doesn’t miss the way Sam grins around the glass as he swallows the rest.

But the smile doesn’t last.

“I get it,” Sam says. “You think…. You think I needed somebody after Jess, and you were there, and that was that, right?”

It’s more blunt that Dean would have owned to, but what’s the point in denial?

“You gotta get through things however you can,” he says, and does a good job of making it sound like that’s okay, like realising he’s a coping mechanism hasn’t ripped him into tiny pieces.

Sam shifts around to face him. “That’s not what I’m doing, Dean. That’s not what this is. Do I miss Jess? Yeah. Do I hate that she died like that, because of me? You know it.

“Is she why I want you, need you? Not a chance. We both know this….”. He waves his hand between them. “This was always where we were gonna end up. We just got there down a road neither of us saw coming, with an extra passenger.”

Dean grins, but it’s shallow. He knows Sam wants to know who his baby daddy is, but that’s not something he plans to share with his brother.

Sam doesn’t need to know, and if he did know Dean’s pretty sure he wouldn’t want to.

But he can see Sam’s stepping up here, not that Dean needs a hand raising his kid - he’s not going to knock back the offer, either, especially not with how things are shaping up between them.

“So, what? The three of us, on the road, the family business?”

He isn’t surprised when Sam shakes his head, but he had to ask.

After being dragged back and forth across the country, left in motel rooms alone with a box of cereal to keep them going until John came back, that is not a life Dean wants for his kid.

“We find Dad,” Sam says, “and then we find someplace to settle down.”

Dean leans his head to rest on his brother’s shoulder. 

They have a game plan, and this is how it’s gonna be.


End file.
